Northeastern University

Founded in 1898, Northeastern is a global research university with a distinctive, experience-driven approach to education and discovery, powered by the world’s most far-reaching cooperative education program.

Astadia Europe (Anubex) helped Northeastern University modernize their IT platform from a mainframe IDMS environment to an Oracle database environment. In the process, the university was able to retain their application assets and improve the openness of their historical and current student enrolment data.

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The Challenges

The university decided to consolidate their underlying IT platforms after conducting an assessment of their application portfolio. This highlighted three main weaknesses of the mainframe-based applications:

• Difficulty in managing and access data in the mainframe IDMS database and the COBOL VSAM files
• Skills shortages, since staff able to maintain and support the IDMS legacy applications on an IBM z/OS mainframe is increasingly difficult to find
• The costs for running the mainframe applications (total cost of ownership) were extremely high

Watch the replay of our How to Future-Proof Legacy Data from CA IDMS Business Systems webinar >

The Project

"The Mainframe Retirement" project was designed to liberate Northeastern University from the dependency on the mainframe platform. Astadia was able to complete the migration project within the agreed deadlines, including the transformation of both the IDMS database and the COBOL VSAM files, thanks to its suite of conversion tools and unique project approach.

"Anubex provided a superior solution for our IDMS migration project. The Anubex staff was professional, accommodating, and efficient. Our project was completed within budget and exceeded our expectations." - Northeastern University's Director of Administrative Application Services

The Benefits

Some of the benefits of the methodology and the migration and testing tools we used include:

• Minimal risks  
• Minimal change management
• No business interruption
• Short duration
• No user re-training, as the migrated application is functionally equivalent to the original application

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